Today’s guest review is by Hannah Farber, an assistant professor at Columbia University. Her scholarship has appeared in the New England Quarterly, Early American Studies and the Journal of the Early Republic; she is at work on a monograph on marine insurance, tentatively titled Underwriters of the United States.
What the Constitution Means to Me, a play currently running at the New York Theater Workshop offers a hopeful, accessible, and sophisticated vision of a renewal of American Constitutional life.
Sari Altschuler, 
“Had a map been drawn . . . of Mr. Smith’s movements through the streets of New-York. . . a tangled hydra indeed would have been revealed,” begins the second chapter of Francis Spufford’s book Golden Hill (53). As my fellow Junto reviewers 
What a pleasure it is to wander around mid-eighteenth-century New York City with Francis Spufford, admiring the city’s homes with their “stepped Dutchwork eaves” (17) and their “blue-gray pediment[s] of Connecticut pine” (11). What a pleasure, too, to join him in pawing through the humbler artifacts of daily life in the colonial city. Pap (1). Milk punch (42). A bog-wig (2). Every page of Golden Hill overflows with weird stuff like this, and it’s just great. 
Many novels are about struggles to know the truth, and to live in a world of ambiguity, secrets, and false pretences. In Golden Hill, those themes are given eighteenth-century specificities. They appear in all sorts of symbolic guises, but none more frequently and clearly stated than the murky, miscellaneous substance of eighteenth-century money. If Golden Hill is a novel about what it means to take something—or somebody—at face value, that metaphor is made literal when the protagonist Richard Smith walks into a merchant’s office in the book’s opening pages and presents “a paper worth a thousand pounds.” 
In American Honor, Craig Bruce Smith places morals, virtue, and ethics at the center of the American Revolution. Smith argues that in the late-colonial period, understandings of honor transformed. Instead of something hereditable, honor became based on merit. That “ethical transformation” helped bring about the Revolution. Independence then allowed Americans to realize its potential. In a phrase, you might say the American Revolution was “made on honor, sold on merit.”[1] 
The Junto 